Detainee 441: that was Mansoor Adayfi's only identity in Guantánamo prison for fourteen years. Gutted from his previous life in Yemen, the orange color of the jumpsuit made him equal to other prisoners, including torture in the form of drowning, electrocution, sleep deprivation, force-feeding, beatings, and verbal, sexual and psychological abuse. Fourteen years, from 19 to 33, in which he lost track of time, his previous life and his ambitions, and in which he was never accused of any crime by the US government. An arbitrary and indefinite detention: another of the more than 700 that have occurred in Guantánamo in more than two decades of the War on Terror.
He arrived on February 9, 2002, being one of the first detainees to land in this legal hole in the southeast of Cuba. Three months earlier, at the age of 18, he had been kidnapped in Afghanistan by a warlord, who sold him to the United States, claiming that he was an Al Qaeda "fighter." No proof was necessary: for the George Bush administration, the fight against terrorism took precedence over respect for human rights. "After 9/11, US military planes began dropping leaflets offering $5,000 to anyone who could hand them over anyone suspected of belonging to Al Qaeda or being the Taliban. Many Afghans made large amounts of money from it. To me I got the other side of the coin," explains Adayfi in a telephone interview.
He spent the next three months in a clandestine CIA detention center. In that unknown – or, rather, classified – location he began his hell. He turned 19 during the three months in which he was subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques," which were nothing more than torture in search of a confession. Adayfi ended up giving answers that satisfied the officers, eager to put an end to the abuse. But he didn't end there.
"When they transferred us to Guantánamo we had no idea where we were going. Because that is not just a prison, it is a black hole: there is no system, there are no laws, no justice, no human rights, there is nothing. That is why they chose that place, to be able to put people outside the US legal system," he denounces. "No one told us anything: where we were, why, or until when. I never had rights, no explanations, not even charges, much less a trial."
Adayfi explains that the torture he had experienced in the CIA prison multiplied in his first years in Guantánamo, in which he remembers being abused "day and night", which he confused when he was left in solitary confinement as punishment, in a cell. small and without light. "I became a number. They dehumanized us each and every day. We were punished for speaking, for behaving like human beings. They wanted to turn us into monsters so they could tell the world that they were arresting evil people. They did everything to create this narrative".
"They used us as an experimentation laboratory," he says, something that numerous independent investigations have confirmed over the years. Like that of lawyers Mark Denbeaux and Jonathan Hafetz, who in their study America's Battle Lab explain how the Bush government tortured prisoners with impunity with two objectives: the first, to obtain useful intelligence information to locate Al Qaeda terrorists and others. Islamist groups; the second, to experiment with different torture techniques, pushing the detainees to the limit, to use them in other places in the world and train their interrogators.
"Our body was the battlefield," summarizes Adayfi. "Their weapon was torture and ours was the hunger strike. When you are there, your body and your mind go on a journey towards death. It is not something fun, you notice how they are destroyed little by little. It was our way of protest against abuses. But they couldn't even do that: "when we were on hunger strike, they forced us to eat, they put a tube up our nose to feed us, and they increased the levels of torture so that we would give up. Then, they put us in solitary confinement in retaliation."
When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he stopped many of these practices and "living conditions improved," Adayfi acknowledges, "but we had already lived through many years of torture, and the abuses did not stop." Furthermore, "by that point, he was already completely broken inside. Just being imprisoned for years without reason and without charges is in itself a form of torture." Another constant remained: the prisoners did not receive adequate medical treatment, a complaint that the lawyers of the thirty detainees remaining in Guantánamo continue to maintain to this day.
Over the years, new prison camps were added to Guantánamo, and Adayfi was moved to a new cell, but he was still in a terrible state: "in the summer, it was like an oven, and in the winter, it was cold and damp." At that time, he began to have more contact with the other detainees, with whom he shared the abuses that they all went through without exception: "It was something collective. It was a US program for all prisoners."
Chatting with others helped him remember his past, gave him back his identity. Something she also achieved through art. "We drew flowers using apple stems as pencils and Styrofoam cups as paper," she recalls. "We started drawing in 2010, but most of it was destroyed years later. It was very important for us, because it humanized us, it connected us with our previous life: it helped us survive. And also to resist, because our art was a way of express ourselves against injustice and mistreatment".
After 14 years of confinement, in 2016 he found an escape route. The previous year, the US had reevaluated his case and officially acknowledged that he had no evidence that he had ever been linked to Al Qaeda. He was authorized to be released and included in the complex system of resettlement of detainees abroad, which consisted of a series of secret agreements with third countries.
He wanted to go to Qatar, where he had family, or to Oman, whose treatment of detainees had a good reputation among inmates at the Caribbean prison. But the American government offered him another way out: Serbia. At first, Adayfi rejected the offer, since his only knowledge of the country was its massacre of Bosnian Muslims in the Balkan War. The government insisted, promising him that he could start from scratch and that he would be treated as another citizen, with financial aid, a passport and an identification document. Adayfi accepted when he saw that he had no other option.
When he arrived in Belgrade he realized that nothing was as promised. "He was a Guantánamo 2.0," he states emphatically, since he was alone and under surveillance in a new country from which he was not allowed to leave. Eight years later, he is still in Belgrade, from where he takes this call. Although his situation has improved and he has been able to rebuild part of his life, he feels, like hundreds of Guantánamo prisoners, in legal limbo. "Many are under house arrest. They can't work, they can't visit their families: they can't live, they can't do anything, basically. They threw us to other countries without any kind of monitoring. They tortured us, they abused us, and now they just want to get rid of us. of us".
